Making releases of free software is no big deal... if you've done it before. If you never have then there are all sorts of details that you might not remember to do or might not know about. In this intro-level hackfest, we'll make a release of the Fedora Account System to show an example of doing this. For people that have never released a piece of free software before, you can take the steps involved home with you as a simple template for releasing your application. For those who want to take an increased role in Fedora Infrastructure Development, you should be able to walk away from this confident that you could make a release of FAS if the need arose.

Contents

A release manager's goal

Managing a release of a free software project has two goals.

to get the software into a form that's consumable by other people. For a single piece of free software, that's usually a compressed tarfile with the source and all the build scripts necessary to turn that into a working piece of software.

to get all the people helping you to finish their work in time to make the release work well.

(Human) resources

Free software's strength is in harnessing the work of a large number of people with different talents who all want to see the software progress. When making a release, you'll need to help people from many different groups coordinate their efforts.

Step-by-step: Let's make a FAS release

Notes on things to cover

Keep a document on how to make a release. Release making is fairly repetitive so it's easy to document (or script :-) but other people need to know what steps to take if you should suddenly disappear.